Today’s comic comprehension test

A recent cartoon by Wayno, passed on to me by Chris Hansen:

To understand this cartoon, you need to recognize that the setting — one or two people on a small, otherwise uninhabited, island with a lone palm tree — is a cartoon meme, and that such a setting is referred to in English by the idiom desert island. (You also, of course, need to recognize the items on the island as desserts; and to know how to spell desert and dessert.)

A deserted island or uninhabited island is an island that is not permanently populated by humans. Uninhabited islands are often used in movies or stories about shipwrecked people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of “paradise”.

… Uninhabited islands are sometimes also called “deserted islands” or “desert islands”. In the latter, the adjective “desert” connotes not desert climate conditions, but rather “desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied”. The word “desert” has been “formerly applied more widely to any wild, uninhabited region, including forest-land”, and it is this archaic meaning that appears in the phrase “desert island”. Similarly, the term “deserted island” does not imply that the island was previously inhabited and later deserted.

The term “desert island” is also commonly used figuratively to refer to objects or behavior in conditions of social isolation and limited material means.

As for the cartoonist, you can find information about Wayno and his Waynovision strip on this website.